What’s the Most Influential Book of the Past 20 Years? | Hacker News Reader

What’s the Most Influential Book of the Past 20 Years?

chronicle.com

44 pointssamclemens29 comments

- If you want to find the most influential book, you should probably ask more than a dozen people the question "what is the most influential book". And you should probably look at how frequently certain titles get chosen. Otherwise you just have a list of favourite books from some unrelated academics I've never heard of.

- You should also try and include some academics and/or authors outside of America if you want to be taken seriously.

- Perhaps also consider, if you insist on doing this through a survey, asking people for some kind of evidence that supports the influential reach of their chosen book.

- Finally if you have a list of 20 books arranged vertically so people can can scroll down them, don't have the back button attempt and fail to scroll to each visited location on the page if you expect return visitors.

Overall, I see no value in this list beyond any other "hey I like these books I happened to read" type blog and I'll think twice before clicking on a chronicle link in future.

Is there a way to completely blacklist web sites such as this one? Such as a Firefox extension than would, in my browser, remove results from search engines, entries from hackernews, and so on? There are tons of them where articles are meaningless, and a waste of time.

> Overall, I see no value in this list beyond any other "hey I like these books I happened to read"

But... that’s valuable.

Only if the opinion of the people you ask is considered valuable.

Not really. Unless made by Nazis or people under the age of 7 I’m pretty much always interested in skimming a thoughtful list of nonfiction book recommendations.

...and then hitting back 40 times to return to HN.

That part I was less pleased by. Though as any savvy HN reader knows just holding down the back button on an iPhone, or the equivalent elsewhere, solves that problem neatly.

Or just open in a new tab. When done, close the tab.

I thought article would be about the sorts of books read by the sort of people who read the Chronicle, and sure enough it was. And that was fine with me. If I wanted the sort of list a different sort of group would produce, I would go somewhere else.

As to evidence these are the most influential books in their fields, I assume they spend a lot of time reading what other people in their field say they were influence by, and so I trust they know what they are talking about.

Or is it perhaps your belief that social science and humanities professors should not be allowed to talk about such things?

How else would you do it other than a survey?

Thinking Fast and Slow and various Malcolm Gladwellania have probably out-influenced anything on that list. Nudge by Sunstein has probably had a lot of subtle influence. The Taleb books, esp. Black Swan should be on the list - he essentially introduced a term into common usage (as Gladwell did with the 10,000 hours idea). Piketty will probably have a long tail of influence.

A lot of these books describe social and historical phenomena - they may be the most authoritative scholarly text, but don't really influence broader society as much. The exception would be Critical Race Theory, which has outsized influence both inside and outside of academia.

What a narrow minded list. I can think of at least three titles that have surely been more influential on society: PHP & MySQL for Dummies, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and Fifty Shades of Grey.

We’d all like to believe otherwise of course, but these types of titles that have massive reach are doing far more to influence lives than academic fare.

I agree with you, but Harry Potter was first published in 1997. That makes it outside the 20 year window that this article is focusing on.

In the UK we have the Mann Booker prize. It's a big deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booker_Prize

> The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade.

But the sales figures for the books are tiny.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/10/booker...

https://www.npr.org/2015/09/19/441459103/when-it-comes-to-bo...

I stand corrected and feel quite old. Hard to believe it’s been 21 years since Harry Potter. Next up: Harry Potter and the Midlife Crisis.

That website will seriously screw with your browser's back button.

And I've not even finished to read the first sentence than an overlay slides from the top to make me subscribe to their newsletter or tell me something. I immediately left the site: the back button worked fine for me, but maybe the site had not completely loaded at the time.

I am still surprised by this behavior of websites. I guess they did the math and that these practices make them win more than then lose. The web in 2018 is in a poor shape :-(

Anyway, back at the topic: which book should, for you, be in the most influencial list? Mine would be "A self-sufficient organic kitchen garden" (automatic tranlation from French "Biopotager autosuffisant"): how to grow yourself enough vegetables to not have to buy any.

<Capital in the Twenty-First Century> should be in the list. It's a pity that mainstream media still tries to dodge the most pressing problem in US.

I think it would be more accurate to call it the most influential book for Americans of the past 20 years...

Also, by an academic, else surely the answer is one of the harry Potter novels

Misleading title. This is an opinion of influential books "written by an academic". It is implicit as this an academics website, but in HN it is out of this context.

And to quote the article itself "Ideally, then, the candidates would be like On the Origin of Species or Das Kapital or The Interpretation of Dreams. But those books were written more than 100 years ago, and none by an academic.". So there is a case to be made that academics written books are not that influential.

Also, nobody answered the question -- they answered instead "what book by an academic (near my field) deserves more influence".

Which if this is a gift shopping list is a more useful question. But largely separate from what books have been influential already.

The title has a question mark at the end.

The article then contains the various answers of a variety of people they posed that question to.

The publication is called the chronicle of higher education and the people they asked for their thoughts on the answer all work in higher education.

That seems like exactly the kind of thing I’d expect to see when clicking on that headline.

Intellectual life only became professionalised in the 20th century. So no, that's not the implication.

Marx was funded by Engels, whose father owned a factory in Manchester. Darwin was funded by his parents.

Thankfully, scholars no longer need to depend upon the wealth of their parents and connections.

“The Mechatronics Handbook”, 2nd ed., 2007, is mostly past it today but was a milestone for mankind in so many fields.

Putnam's Bowling Alone was so good it was listed twice.

Don Quixote

The Quran?

... was certainly not written in the past 20 years.

He probably meant that Quran has had the most influence on the world in the past 20 years.

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